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Topic Review (Newest First)

07-16-2012 02:51 PM

Sea Dawg

Re: Length limit for single handers???

Consider low profile above water to be a single hander's advantage over one tall and proud but with lots of windage. A huge keel and lots of windage present a hazard to docking. I believe you'll find docking the largest challenge other than sudden changes in conditions. Another advantage would be more sails, only smaller ones. For example, I sailed a 31' Alden Gaff-rigged Yawl, Cutter rigged on the bowsprit with roller furling, and a small marconi aft. The Main had 3 reef points, so with 4 sails it lent itself to single handing even in a stiff breeze. I found the full keel a bit unmanageable back at the dock when the currents were ripping.
Of course if you have lots of technology you can stretch your limits and you may enjoy this video:

FWIW, I don't know of anybody inexperienced who taught themselves to sail, singlehanded, on a big boat.
I personally think it would be the height of foolishness to try.

You really need to have lots of years and thousands of miles under your belt before you would be ready to cope with misadventures alone on such a vessel.

07-16-2012 06:35 AM

Andrew Troup

Re: Length limit for single handers???

Well .....

The length limit historically is probably held by Alain Colas, on Club Med, in the Observer Single handed Transatlantic Race of 1976

As for displacement, ditto -- Club Med's keel alone weighed 85 tonnes (depleted uranium, courtesy of the French government, so about half the size of a lead keel) ... that's 190,000 lbs hanging under the hull

However the sheer macho record surely goes to Eric Tabarly, in the same race, on Pen Duick VI.

This was possibly the most heavily equipped ocean racing maxi ever built, and was intended for a crew of dozens of strong guys, whereas Club Med was designed specifically for single handing -- although not well enough, as it turned out: the halyards chafed through, one by one, in the race in question -- which incidentally Eric Tabarly won, after his self-steering broke (AFAIK the ONLY concession to being solo which was fitted to the boat), and he hand steered 24/7 for about the last two days..... He even put up a friggin spinnaker, and this was before the days of virtually all labour saving devices for solo sailors. Certainly NO roller reefing or furling. Headsail sheets were wire rope, the kind you tow trucks out of ditches with; shackles were D shackles the size of a small fist.

Colas, OTOH, couldn't even finish the race: he ended up pulling into Newfoundland IIRC because one by one all the sails had fallen down, and it was not possible for a single guy to rehoist even one of them, let alone eight. (He had brought a whole team on board specifically to raise sail, and they all had to get off before the warning gun)

Which only goes to reinforce the excellent point made by Foolish Muse about a page back: they both had stupidly inappropriate boats, but one guy coped when things went wrong, and the other couldn't.

Tabarly was deservedly a sailing legend, absolutely one of a kind, but single-handing was really his forte: he had none of the leadership skills it takes to run a big boat successfully other than the ability to do most anything himself better than 99.9 of potential crew. A generation of starry-eyed, hero-worshipping young French sailors were (generally) privately disappointed when they finally made it onto his crew list and found out his limitations as a manager of men.

11-16-2011 05:41 PM

Boasun

8' sabots are good for single handing... Then there is the extremine the "Maltese Falcon" a computer controlled mega yacht.
My own is a 45' ketch.... Which is plenty big for me...

11-16-2011 05:17 PM

imagine2frolic

If you like the idea of having space. Look at multihulls, and get the space with a shorter boat, twin engines, smaller gear, and still get the speed of a big boat........i2f

11-16-2011 11:15 AM

svzephyr44

I single hand a 22,000 lb 42 foot Catalina sloop. As someone mentioned above, its all about the last 5 feet to the dock. I did not purchase this boat with the intent of single hand live aboard cruising. I might have purchased something a bit smaller to reduce the physical effort of sail handling. However, in adverse conditions you generally are working to reduce sail, much easier than putting sail up. Also, as a cruiser I don't do "racing" changes. If it takes 15 minutes to raise the main, with appropriate rests in between cranking, so be it. That is all good.

What is difficult to control is the last 5 feet to a dock by yourself under adverse conditions. With a heavy boat you can not muscle it. You have to sail/motor it into the dock. Amateurs use bow and stern lines, the initiated use spring lines. A spring with a big loop on the dock end that can be hooked over a cleat gets that very important first attachment without ramming the bow or the stern into the dock or having the boat stream out at a 90 degree angle to the dock.

This leads to three conclusions:
1) You can't go bigger than a size at which you are comfortable that you can handle the sheets and halyards with whatever equipment is on the boat - which could include electric winches etc. Of course anything but people power gives you the additional risk that things might fail.
2) If you have the boat handling skills it doesn't much matter how heavy the boat is when you are docking, you are using the engine and rudder to make your approaches.
3) You need to have the common sense to not sail over your head. I have chosen to anchor out rather than try to approach a dock in adverse conditions, sat in port more than once waiting for a weather window, and run from adverse conditions in the open ocean (not fun, and it usually only makes things a little less adverse, but heck, you got to do what you got to do!)

Fair winds and followings seas.

11-16-2011 01:42 AM

Jace2

Excellent point, FoolishMuse.

11-16-2011 12:12 AM

FoolishMuse

The best advice I can give is to reiterate what was mentioned earlier, and really emphasise it. You must be able to handle the boat when EVERYTHING goes wrong.
Electric winches that suddenly jam.
Electric windlass that breaks.
Spinnaker that is sailing wonderfully until the pole downhaul breaks in 25 knots of wind.
Motor stops in 15 knots of wind inside the docks.
Etc, etc, etc,.....

You get the point.

Singlehanding is more about handling all of the many things that go wrong than anything else. Get a boat that you can handle when the absolute worst goes wrong, and you will be happy.

11-14-2011 06:57 PM

MikeinLA

Quote:

Originally Posted by St Anna

Hi Mike,
I looked at the liberty 458. It looks similar in many ways to my peterson 46.

Hi St Anna. That makes sense since the Liberty 458 used the original Peterson hull, can't remember if it was the 44 or the KP 46.

Mike

11-13-2011 10:55 PM

killarney_sailor

Not entirely true

Quote:

Originally Posted by davidpm

And then there is anchoring. Power windless is great but if you can't anchor without it then your options can be limited by any one of several glitches.
For most full time cruisers anchoring is something they do almost every day

A full-time cruiser may be anchored every day but that does not mean they are anchoring like on a charter where you are moving around to see more places in less time. Once you get anchored in a nice spot you may stay for many days or weeks.

This is not to imply that a good windlass is any less important. With proper (ie all chain) ground tackle I would not want to be handling anchoring chores on even a boat of 12,000 lbs. It can be done but loses its appeal very quickly indeed - like once. With any boat with a windlass it is a good idea to figure out how you will handle the anchor if the windlass quits - usually a process involving a couple of lines with chain hooks and a big winch.

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